I think the Programming Collective Intelligence is going to go down as one of the most important and influential books of the decade. I'm a product manager, bu

I think the Programming Collective Intelligence is going to go down as one of the most important and influential books of the decade. I'm a product manager, but was a Java & Perl programmer previously. I didn't know Python before I read this book. But the concepts are presented so clearly, the examples use web APIs, and the spark of creativity each chapter brings too great, that I could not resist the urge to fire up iPython on my Mac and play with some of the algorithms. The book's examples are all command-line driven. But I've also converted a few of the examples into web projects to help me explore the possibilities more efficiently and demo/prototype some things for my company. Python works perfectly well as a CGI web application and you don't need the overhead of Django for learning and taking examples from this book to the next level. I've since read several data mining and machine learning books, and must say that none come close to the breadth, programming detail, and hands-on ease presented in this book. The book has created a rich opportunity to learn and explore concepts such as collaborative filtering, clustering, optimization, decision trees, and text mining with Bayesian classification. Python is easy to read and learn.